Department of Anthropology and Sociology

Dr Bhrigupati Singh

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Key information

Roles: Department of Anthropology and Sociology Senior Lecturer
Department: Department of Anthropology and Sociology
Email address: bs60@soas.ac.uk

Biography

Dr Bhrigupati Singh is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, working at the intersection of medical anthropology, religious studies, philosophy, and psychiatry.

He completed his PhD in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University in 2010. Before joining SOAS, he taught at Brown University, Ashoka University, King’s College London, and held visiting positions in Psychiatry at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS, Delhi) and Brown University.

His first book, Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India (University of Chicago Press 2015) was awarded the Joseph Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences by the American Institute of Indian Studies, an Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion by the American Academy of Religion, and was a finalist for the Clifford Geertz Book Prize. He is a co-editor of The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (Duke University Press, 2014), and serves as co-editor of a book series, Thinking from Elsewhere (Fordham University Press). His articles have appeared in journals including Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Transcultural Psychiatry, and Contributions to Indian Sociology.

At present he is working on two related book projects: a book of essays on concepts of the psyche titled Waxing and Waning Life: Spectrum Analysis of Mental Illness and Health, and an anthropological monograph titled The Riot Laboratory: Hindu and Muslim Neighbours in Delhi, set in the “resettlement colony” of Trilokpuri in East Delhi. In 2018-19 he received a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin) for his current work on mental health and illness. In collaboration with psychiatrists at AIIMS, he is developing new research methods and courses at the intersection of anthropology and social psychiatry.

Alongside a core focus on poverty, mental illness and wellbeing, he has also consistently pursued a related research theme, focused on moving beyond critiques of Eurocentrism, and what it would mean to “decolonize” thought, not as a form of nativism, but in finding new ways of thinking about how concepts and genealogies of thought cross regions, disciplines, and religious and secular formations. He has pursued this thought process in collaborative projects including The Ground Between (2014), A Joyful History of Anthropology (2016), and Steps to a Global Thought (2023).